TITLE: An Empire for a King: The Conquest of Algeria at Louis-Philippe's Versailles
SPEAKER: Jennifer Sessions
EVENT DATE: 04/17/2008
FORMAT: Video + Captions
RUNNING TIME: 62 minutes
TRANSCRIPT: View Transcript (link will open in a new window)
DESCRIPTION:
Versailles is best known today as the palace of Louis XIV, but in the 19th century, the chateau had another life as a museum of national history. The history museum's galleries are now mostly closed to the public, but in its heyday, one of its largest and most popular sections was a suite of rooms devoted to the French conquest of Algeria. The creation and reception of these galleries, commissioned by King Louis-Philippe and decorated by the painter Horace Vernet over the 1840s, offers a unique window into the politics and culture of empire in 19th-century France.
Speaker Biography: Kluge Fellow Jennifer Sessions is from the University of Iowa.
